[.uk] Kitchens: A Design Source Book (ISBN 1841729302)

Amazon.com Review:
The kitchen is, and to some extent always has been, the heart of a home. When considering a redesign, Lee points out that the reader should anticipate expense but comprehend that a well-planned and well-designed kitchen can not only improve the quality of life, ease food preparation and entertaining (and clean-up!), but also greatly enhance the value of a property when done thoughtfully and well. More than 400 specially commissioned color photographs bring this large, attractive book to life for the reader. But it is much more than a pretty picture book--it includes serious discussion of principles, styles, equipment, and decoration; the importance of planning and functional design; and considerations of materials in relation to their aesthetic as well as practical and functional attributes. The index is useful and comprehensive, and the source list for materials and equipment is thorough. This is a serious, and seriously attractive, book for anyone planning or dreaming of a kitchen makeover. --Mark A. Hetts

Disfunctional kitchens R us:
I checked this out from the library hoping to find some good ideas for a kitchen remodel. This book is full of showy kitchens that no real cook would tolerate. If you want you kitchen to look pretty, modern, or authentic, this may help you. If you want to use your kitchen instead of just dressing it up to look nice, buy another book.

Another hit for Vinny Lee:
I enjoyed the other book in the series, so I assumed this would be a delight as well. I am so glad that I decided to buy this! Wonderful detail and full of great ideas, this gets the creative juices flowing! Kitchens is a great buy.

A Very Good Starting Point For Kitchen Design.:
After reading this book you'll realize that, gone are the old notions that a kitchen is the place where June Cleaver baked cookies for The Beaver, Wally, and the omnipresent Eddie Haskell! The kitchen has now become a showcase of sleek design and gleaming stainless steel, and YES you CAN cook in it! This book is full of ideas for designing your kitchen and using available space to maximum advantage without sacrificing beauty. From the traditional to the contemporary kitchen you will find many excellent ideas, and it will broaden your horizons about what can be used in a kitchen. Imagine having a set of chairs by: Charles Eames, Alvar Aalto and Marcel Brever sitting side by side while the Dualit grills your sandwich!

Too hard to read:
Small type, cluttered pages, white type dropped out of photos -- I got a headache trying to read this book. There may be good ideas here, but I'll never know. Unless your vision is 20/20 and you have a good reading lamp and magnifiers, skip it.

Great variety!:
I take this book off the shelf all the time to skim it for new ideas (someday I'll actually undertake my renovation, I hope). Every time I read it I see something I hadn't noticed before. I love the variety of kitchens in this book--very modern, very retro, very traditional. There are tons of colors, tons of kinds of photographs. I also love that many of the kitchens are not perfect--there are funky, home-made countertops, old floors, jumbles of utensils, and so on. It's refreshing in the face of so many books and magazines that assume that everyone wants a perfect, "new" looking kitchen with top-of-the-line everything. A lot of the kitchens appear to be European, which I appreciate because I think a lot of them use space in ways that American kitchens do not.